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Wednesday, April 27, 2016

‘ISIS’ in Afghanistan: Spectre or mirage?

These names
have figured a lot in international news coverage: Islamic State (IS), Islamic
State of Iraq and Shams (ISIS), Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),
and DAESH. These aren't the names of countries or separate political/terrorist
groups, they all denote the same entity.

The Saudi regime calls the group DAESH, as do Afghanistan’s President, Ashraf
Ghani, and US Secretary of State John Kerry. In fact, Saudi King Salman bin
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz once referred to the group as FAESH, an expletive.

Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, DAESH’s putative leader and self-anointed Caliph, prefers
the exalted term ‘Islamic State’. He has prohibited his enterprise being called
‘DAESH’.

It would be surprising if ISIS didn’t covet control over Afghanistan for its
inestimable geostrategic and geopolitical importance, for its scope of
doctrinal influence, its military power projection and for its financial gains.

ISIS’s aims include spreading its ideology of reductionism and violent
extremism throughout the populations of Central Asian Muslim republics:
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan, Kazakhstan, and further
afield, in Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Chechnya in the Russian Federation and Chinese
Turkestan.

Its location in Afghanistan enables potential targetting of the Indian
subcontinent, including Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Afghanistan is the most convenient geo-strategic location for the pursuance of
these aims.

Furthermore, consider the scale of the mercenary stake involved in the control
of cultivation of Afghan poppy and the production, stocking, transport and
trade of opiate narcotic derivatives, especially heroin. Just one province of
Afghanistan, Helmand, accounts for 90 per cent of heroin consumed in Europe.
Afghanistan’s narcotics have a worldwide reach. Afghanistan is rich in
minerals, including 13 of the 17 rare earths, cobalt, platinum, gold, silver,
and gems of the highest quality.

The world’s largest stock of lithium, a key raw material for electronics, is in
Afghanistan, as are copper and iron ore of the highest cuprous and ferrous
content. Illicit mining, contraband mineral and gems trade, rapacious timber
extraction and human trafficking have boomed in Afghanistan.

The Amu Darya basin has substantial hydrocarbon resources. The TAPI project
envisages laying a pipeline from adjacent Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to
Pakistan and India.

However, the rationale of Afghanistan’s geostrategic and geopolitical value
must be equally attractive to others, near and far, who are zealous to gain and
retain dominance in Afghanistan.

Whatever the truth about ISIS being in Afghanistan, it is important to
understand

that there is a profound conflict and tension between Islam as understood and
practised in Afghanistan and ISIS’s ultra-reductionism and violent extremism.

Raising awareness on this score is vital to waging a concerted information war
against violent extremism in Afghanistan and in Central and South Asia, China,
South-East Asia and even in Europe and North America.

Afghanistan has a millennium-old rigorously conservative Sunni Muslim society,
that is now perhaps 87-88 per cent of the country’s population. However, Afghan
Sunni Muslims have adhered to Hanafi Sharia ever since Imam Abu Hanifa (who,
incidentally, hailed from a Kabul-based family) generated and developed
jurisprudence known as Hanafi Sharia (Sharia: literally, the path to the oasis)
in the first century following the inception of Islam.

Under the Constitution of Afghanistan, Hanafi jurisprudence is privileged as a
residual source of law in the absence of explicit legislation or other
constitutional provisions.

Afghanistan also has an age-old Sufi tradition and the belief and practice of
Islam in Afghanistan is suffused with Sufism.

Thus, Afghans of all sects regularly visit saints’ shrines, revere spiritual
and holy persons, seek their intercession with the divine, and use amulets and
other ‘protections’. Sufi saint Hazrat Shaikh Salim Chishti, whose dargah is in
Ajmer, was from Afghanistan and his place of rest continues to exert a powerful
pull on Afghans.

ISIS and Wahhabism emphatically trample on both the Hanafi Sharia as well as
Sufism. Both denounce these as un-Islamic, Kuffr, Haram, opposed to the Quran
and the Hadith, and say they must be destroyed and all adherents must be
executed without mercy.

The brutality and sadism during the Taliban regime has not been forgotten by
the people of Afghanistan.

In the current information age, ISIS is viewed by Afghans to be a worse
proposition, advanced by a similar combination of external forces, for similar
ends and purposes but on a larger and more alarming scale.

Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (4th century BCE) in his Art of War had enunciated
the axiom: “Kill one, frighten ten thousand.”

There is, however, a Pashto saying: “An Afghan may with ease be led into Hell
on courteous request, but will fiercely resist being forced to ascend to
Heaven.”

Unlike peoples of other nations in the region, Afghans are not easily
frightened, not easily subdued and cowed, nor easily dominated. Though riven
with tribal feuds and inter-ethnic tension and conflict, they fight back and
fight hard against external aggressors.

The masterminds of ISIS, Taliban, or any other such entity invented in the days
ahead, even if a stupendously potent threat, will learn that lesson and it will
be a costly one.